[MSN] New Web site to help identify art looted by the Nazis

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

New Web site to help identify art looted by the Nazis


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Talya Halkin, THE JERUSALEM POST  Jun. 4, 2006 

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A new on-line initiative, created by the Swift-Find registry in
collaboration with Sotheby's, will soon make previously hard-to-track data
about Nazi-era looted art easily available to the general public, thus
speeding attempts to reclaim the stolen valuables. 

On Sunday, the head of Sotheby's Restitution Department, Lucian Simmons, and
the historic data consultant for Swift-Find, Shauna Isaac, spoke at the Tel
Aviv Museum together with the senior curator of Yad Vashem and with Larry
Kate, an American lawyer with expertise in restitution claims. 

In an interview prior to their talk, at Sotheby's Tel Aviv headquarters,
Simmons and Isaac said they hoped the information they provided would help
raise awareness of new possibilities for tracking and recovering art looted
during World War II. 

The Swift-Find Looted Art Project (www.swift-findlootedart.com), Isaac said,
had been designed to help victims of the Holocaust robbed by the Nazis
reclaim stolen valuables. 

The year-old project offers free access to claimants, enabling them both to
search the site's extensive inventory of objects believed to have been
looted during World War II, and to list objects they believe had at one time
belonged to their families. 

According to Simmons, Sotheby's has agreed to share the extensive database
it has collected since its Restitution Department was founded 10 years ago
and make it available on-line for the first time. The database is expected
to become accessible through Swift-Find over the next few months. 

"The department was founded to screen objects and make sure Sotheby's didn't
sell looted objects," Simmons said. 

In the event that an object consigned for sale is revealed by Sotheby's to
have been looted by the Nazis, the auction house will help find the heirs
and in many cases will facilitate a negotiation process between the
consigner and the heirs to the family that lost the property. 

"We have a pretty unique archive on World War II theft, and we can help them
understand what they lost," Simmons said. 

Oftentimes, even when the heirs no longer have a legal right to the objects,
they and the consigners will settle on a way of dividing the profits from a
sale of the objects, which may in some cases take place at Sotheby's. 

"If such a looted object were sold, even legally, the press would scream and
nobody would buy it, so it's best for consigners in such cases to bite the
bullet and reach a resolution," Simmons said. 

Simmons said that over the past nine years, Sotheby's had auctioned hundreds
of works of art that had been identified as looted and whose heirs had been
tracked down. Among the most notable such works, he said, was an 1876
painting by Monet, which sold for 2.7 million, and a Schiele painting that
had sold for 12.3m. 

According to Isaac, even prior to the addition of the Sotheby database to
its site, the Swift-Find registry currently contains an inventory of 25,000
looted objects that have yet to be recovered by their legal owners. 

"Museums can use the site when they know they possess looted art works but
don't know their provenance, and want to clear up the title," she said. "And
people can use the site to search for objects whose whereabouts are
unknown." Swift-Find, Isaac said, was the first Web site that could match
data provided with museums by data provided by claimants. 

Although she said she could not comment at this time about any objects that
had been identified and restored, Isaac indicated that some progress had
been made to this effect through the site, and that so far it was "very
productive." 

The introduction of an advanced technology in the near future will allow the
site to scan photographs provided by claimants and identify the art works in
them, in the event that they matched up with looted artworks in the site's
database. 

The technology, Isaac said, could even match up different images of the same
artwork taken from different angles - for example, in an old family
photograph and in a museum archive. 

The digitization of the Sotheby's archive, Simmons aid, would make available
information about numerous works traded in Nazi-controlled Europe, including
catalogues produced by auctioneers supported by the Nazi regime. 

"The key is that people will now for the first time have widely available
access to this information," Simmons said.

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